Supreme Court turns away Planned Parenthood defunding casesThe Supreme Court on Monday declined to review whether states can block Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers from their Medicaid programs, passing on a pair of cases that would have served as the first major abortion test for the court’s new conservative majority.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, joined the court's four liberal jurists in turning away a pair of petitions from Kansas and Louisiana seeking the ban on abortion providers.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, dissented. It takes four justices to agree to accept a case.
Thomas, suggesting the court was wary of taking a case with "Planned Parenthood" in the title, asserted the cases weren't about abortion rights but whether individuals have a right to challenge a state’s decision to eliminate a Medicaid provider.
“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty," Thomas wrote. "If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background."
One appeals court has previously ruled that states could block funding to Planned Parenthood. Monday's action by the Supreme Court doesn't affect that decision.
States have tried to defund Planned Parenthood since a series of undercover videos in 2015 purported to show the women's health organization profiting off the sale of tissue from abortions. A series of investigations found no evidence of wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, which has forcefully denied the claims made by anti-abortion activists behind the videos.
Justices had twice earlier this year declined to act on petitions in Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri and Gee v. Planned Parenthood of Gulf Cost. The decision to refuse the cases came after Kavanaugh was confirmed as the ninth justice.
“We are pleased that lower court rulings protecting patients remain in place," said Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Leana Wen in a statement. "Every person has a fundamental right to health care, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they earn."
For decades, no federal dollars have gone to fund abortions, but there have been many legal battles over whether providers like Planned Parenthood that offer a wide range of health services in addition to abortion are entitled to some amount of public health care funding.
Defunding Planned Parenthood has been a priority of the GOP base, and anti-abortion groups have been frustrated that a Republican-controlled Congress and administration has so far been unable to do so. Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court in October following the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a crucial swing vote on abortion cases, was thought to have delivered the five votes needed to back the states.
The cases in Kansas and Louisiana, filed earlier this year, ask whether patients can sue states for excluding Planned Parenthood from state Medicaid funding.
In February, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Kansas was wrong to to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, writing that states can’t cut off funding for reasons “unrelated to the provider’s competence and the quality of the healthcare it provides.” Four other appeals courts have ruled that Medicaid patients have the right to access the provider of their choice.
But the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has held that states do have the right to terminate a provider’s Medicaid contract and that residents have no right to challenge that decision.
The Supreme Court's action Monday allows the split decisions to stand in different federal circuits. Thomas, in his dissent, wrote that the Supreme Court should have taken the cases to resolve conflicting findings from lower courts.
"Because of this Court’s inaction, patients in different States — even patients with the same providers — have different rights to challenge their State’s provider decisions," Thomas wrote.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/10/supreme-court-planned-parenthood-defunding-case-845056
